Democrats starting to flee sinking Obamacare ship

Since the beginning of September, according to a press release, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has received 30,842 calls, emails and letters from Californians about the Affordable Care Act. Many of DiFi’s correpondents “are very distressed by cancellations of their insurance policies and who are facing increased out-of-pocket costs.”

It could be worse. According to Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, between 900,000 and one million Californians stand to lose their health care on Dec. 31.

Tuesday, Feinstein’s office announced that the California Senator will be a co-sponsor to Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) legislation: Keeping the Affordable Care Act Promise Act. (The bill’s title is a rebuke of sort toward President Obama’s failure to keep his pledge, delivered some 34 times, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”)

Likewise Bill Clinton said that President Obama “should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep what they got.”

Feinstein explains: “This bill provides a simple fix to a complex problem. This bill will extend the grandfather date for individual insurance plans so that individuals who have insurance policies they like can keep them indefinitely, unless the individual chooses another plan or the insurer stops providing health insurance in the individual market.

Insurance companies must continue to offer—indefinitely—all currently existing insurance plans as of December 31, 2013, on the individual market;

Note the word: “indefinitely.”

There’s just one problem: While Feinstein calls the Landrieu bill a “commonsense fix,” the proposed law runs roughshod over the contract between Covered California and its providers. As Covered California head Peter Lee explained to the Chronicle, insurers wanted a uniform date Dec. 31 for the end of their grandfathered plans. Covered California agreed, no doubt because providers could calculate lower premiums if they anticipated the continued business of healthy individual plan owners.

(Due to jurisdictional issues, Jones was able to cut a deal with Blue Shield to extend its individual coverage through March 31, as I wrote here. But Jones doesn’t have that leverage with the other Covered California providers.) We’ll see if the other plans are willing to play along with the Landrieu bill, as Blue Shield played along with Jones. No word yet from DiFiHQ in response to my query.